The advent of digital computers has greatly changed how users transport and access music, movies, television shows, photographs, and other sensory-stimulating content. Digital recording, storage, and reproduction technologies allow users to experience a wide variety of content from relatively small, portable CDs such as CD-ROM and DVD players. As used herein, the term “CD player” is intended to include, but is not limited to, CDs capable of playing and/or recording CD-ROM's, DVD's, and other portable, removable media. Similarly, the terms “CD” and “CD-ROM” are intended to include, but are not limited to, write-once and rewritable portable, removable media, including, without limitation, CD+RW, DVD-RW, BluRay DVD's, and the like.
The creation of the Motion Picture Entertainment Group Layer 3 (“MP3”) audio encoding standard has allowed CD's to carry even more than the 72 or 80 minutes of music traditionally carried by such media by changing the method by in which the audio files are stored. Similarly, inexpensive, high-resolution digital video cameras are now available for home and professional video creation, and a wide variety of software is available that allows consumers and professionals to easily create new content. Combined with the popularity and low cost of CD writing hardware (referred to generally as “burners”) and the related media, this has lead to an explosion in the number of portable CD players.
While portable CD players give users the ability to carry entire music and/or video libraries or other such single- and multi-media content on a handful of physical media, such CDs often pose unique problems for users. For example, users can become bored with accessing the same content over and over, even where the order and/or frequency of playback is determined through one or more playlists. Thus, users frequently wish to update their CD's with new content.
Users can add content to a CD, and especially a rewritable CD, through a variety of means. With respect to music content, such means include creating one or more content files from songs on a commercial audio CD, DVD, audio or video tape, or phonograph, a process referred to as “ripping”. While ripping is popular, it requires that a user visit a bricks-and-mortar or online retailer, purchase the CD or other physical copy of the content, and then take the time to convert the content file or files into the desired format and burn the ripped content to a new CD. This is both time consuming and technologically challenging for many consumers. To help facilitate users gaining access to larger music libraries, and thus allowing users to enhance the scope of content available on CD's, some services have been launched through which a user can download an MP3 or other content file from an online music source.
Several different content sources have become available in recent years, and many use differing business models. One business model, supported by the Yahoo! Music Engine service offered by Yahoo!, Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif., is the “tethered-download” or subscription model. In this model, users pay a flat fee to download content files from a central source to their home computer. This flat fee is typically relatively low because content downloaded from such services is protected using digital rights management (“DRM”) technology, and will frequently expire (i.e. cannot be played or accessed) if the user stops subscribing to the service.
While such services have gained in popularity, not all content can be burned to CD's, because CD players do not generally support digital rights management. Thus, the user is not able to take full advantage of the content provided by such services.